The Years, Annie Ernaux
The Years is ‘a Remembrance of Things Past for our age of media domination and consumerism’ says the New York Times.
It is a monumental account of twentieth-century French history as refracted through the life of one woman.
The Years is a narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present, cultural habits, language, photos, books, songs, radio, television, advertising and news headlines. Annie Ernaux invents a form that is subjective and impersonal, private and communal, and a new genre – the collective autobiography – in order to capture the passing of time.
She often revisits images of herself single, in the streets of cities where she has walked and in the rooms she has occupied – in a young ladies’ hostel in Rouen, in Finchley as an au pair, or a penzione on via Servio Tullio, on holiday in Rome. These are her selves, it seems to her, who continue to exist in these places. In other words, past and future are reversed.
Immerse yourself in the interesting life of a woman with this autobiographic novel translated by Alison L. Strayer, and published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.
Born in 1940, Annie Ernaux grew up in Normandy.
Although her work does not tell the story of her life directly, it is well inspired by those years.
Annie Ernaux stages the experiences that shaped her in her books: her upward mobility (Shame, 1997; La Place, 1983), her adolescence (Ce qu'ils disent ou rien, 1977), her mariage (A Frozen Woman, 1981), her abortion (Happening, 2000), her mother's death (A Woman's Story, 1989).
Her books, in particular A Man’s Place and A Woman’s Story, have become contemporary classics in France. The Years won the Prix Renaudot in France in 2008 and the Premio Strega in Italy in 2016. In 2017, Annie Ernaux was awarded the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her life’s work.
Alison L. Strayer is a Canadian writer and translator that lives in Paris. Her work has been shortlisted twice for the Governor General’s Award for Literature and for Translation, shortlisted for the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal and the Prix littéraire France-Québec, and longlisted for the Albertine Prize. Her translation of The Years was awarded the 2018 French-American Translation Prize in the non-fiction category.
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